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This blog is for readers interested in social applications and technology empowerment inside and outside companies, as we have described in our books Empowered and Groundswell. The blog is part of the Forrester Research blog collection.

March 15, 2007

Upcoming Forrester Boot Camps

by Charlene Li

You may have noticed that the tag line for this blog has changed – a key goal is to help people do their jobs better, to “win” so to speak with social technologies.

To that end, I thought you’d like to know about a few upcoming boot camps Forrester is running. These events are different from large scale conferences – they are typically 1-2 Forrester analysts with a small group of participants, usually around 20 people. We spend an entire day discussing the strategy and tactics needed to win with new technologies. And I personally love the format because it’s a great way for me to immerse myself in the day to day issues that people are facing.

This Boot Camp will introduce new marketing channels and provide techniques for successfully exploring and leveraging the marketing opportunities that each offers. Marketers will learn how to determine if each channel is right for their brand and develop a plan for how to get started.

This Boot Camp will include: • Interactive sessions covering how consumers have adopted each channel, how marketers use each channel today, and how to best leverage each to target consumers.• Sessions covering rich media (video, podcasting, gaming), user-generated content, social media (social networks, wikis, widgets, tagging, etc.), word-of-mouth marketing, mobile marketing, and others.• Examples of how marketers, agencies, and public relations firms have used these emerging marketing channels.

New technologies like blogs, social networking, and RSS are changing the media and marketing landscape. This Boot Camp will not only introduce these new tools, it will also move you quickly into being an active participant in social media and marketing. You'll go home with a better understanding of how to use social marketing — and more importantly, a workable plan for what to do today. Marketers will learn when it is appropriate to use these tools, how to overcome internal resistance to deployment, and how to measure the results.

This Boot Camp will include:• Interactive sessions on consumer adoption and behaviors toward blogs, RSS, social networking, word-of-mouth marketing, and podcasting.• Examples of how marketers, agencies, and public relations firms have used social marketing — and how to avoid the pitfalls.• Hands-on training on how to create blogs and RSS feeds, as well as podcasts. In addition to a technical overview, the training will include best practices on how to manage the internal process of setting up these social marketing tools.• A best practices panel of marketers, agencies, and technology providers.

Blogs are evolving quickly as a communication medium and influencing the development of communications and marketing strategy. With more than 27 million blogs being written today, it is impossible not to find a niche community that can influence customer perceptions of a brand.

As customers increasingly tune out traditional advertising and turn to new communication channels to fill the void, companies must learn how to join in the conversation. Moreover, besides connecting companies and their customers, blogs are also becoming an invaluable collaboration tool within companies to facilitate knowledge management and cross-functional communications.

This Boot Camp will focus on the fundamentals of blogging from a corporate perspective, helping companies develop a blog strategy and implementation plan, including discussion of policy, technology, and process. It will have a heavy focus on hands-on exercises that will complement in-depth presentations on these issues.

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About Forrester

Forrester Research, Inc. (Nasdaq: FORR) is an independent research company that provides pragmatic and forward-thinking advice to global leaders in business and technology. Forrester works with professionals in 19 key roles at major companies providing proprietary research, customer insight, consulting, events, and peer-to-peer executive programs. For more than 27 years, Forrester has been making IT, marketing, and technology industry leaders successful every day. For more information, visit www.forrester.com.